Last year, a Canadian company started out bottling fresh air from the rocky mountains as a joke.
But, increasing air pollution levels in China makes this product become a must-have in the country.
A start-up company, Vitality Air, started bottling fresh air from the Canadian National Park and and sells it all around the pollution-hit China.
The company has seen its sales to soar in China as the country suffocates under heavy air pollution.
The city was forced to shut down businesses, schools and construction sites for a period of time and ordered its people to stay indoors as Beijing issues their second ever pollution red alert.
Many people in China started wearing masks connected to an air filtering machine because of the dangerous levels of pollution. Some cities are barely visible under the dangerous smog.
The bottled air taken from Banff National Park in the majestic Rocky Mountains, sells for roughly 100 yuan ($15) or (729 pesos) in a 7.7 liter can, which is 50 times more expensive than a bottle of mineral water in China.
“Our first shipment of 500 bottles of fresh air were sold in four days,” Co-founder Moses Lam said.
A shipment containing 4,000 more bottles is on its way to China, but most of the bottles has already been bought.
Mr. Lam of Vitality Air admits that they started out the business as a joke when he and co-founder Troy Paquette filled a plastic bag of air and sells it on Ebay for 50 pence, but when a second bag then sold for $160, both of them already knew that they were onto something.
“That’s when we realised there is a market for this,” He said.
Vitality Air’s China representative, Harrison Wang, revealed: “In China fresh air is a luxury, something so precious.”
“The company sees pollution as an issue in China and we want to give people the opportunity to inject a little bit of fresh air into their daily lives”.
The company sells bottled fresh air and oxygen across North America, to the Middle East and India. But China became its biggest overseas market.
